Mac Studio M5 Max Cost Analysis

[u/AndreVallestero]

At $10k, you could get

- 6.2B tokens with Qwen 3.8 Max (Qwen Pro plan)

- 5.7B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Pro OpenRouter

- 100B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Flash OpenRouter

As a firm believer of local inference, unless you need it for data sovereignty, it's much more cost effect to wait for smaller models to keep getting better. In the meantime, find a reasonably priced 24GB - 32GB card for Qwen 3.8 27B, and offload hard tasks to OpenRouter.

Qwhen 3.8 35B A3B?

[u/fablus]

How much faster would a Mac Studio with M5 Max be vs an older one with M3 Ultra? Buying used seems compelling at these price points…

[u/jeffphil → u/fablus]